John Mueller

★★★ Can You Really Opt Out of Google's Mobile First Indexing?

John Mueller responded to a question on Twitter asking whether one could request not to be moved to the Mobile First Index. The answer was negative....

Nov 12, 2018 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Can You Copy-Paste Legal Pages Without Hurting Your SEO?

John Mueller indicated on Twitter that it poses no problem for the search engine if you copy/paste the content of pages such as Terms of Service, Terms of Sale, Legal Notices or other administrative p...

Nov 12, 2018 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Should You Merge Multiple Pages Into One to Improve Your SEO?

John Mueller explained in a hangout that combining multiple pieces of content into a single page could be beneficial for SEO but sometimes also fail to deliver good results. It will be beneficial for ...

Nov 12, 2018 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Why Does Google's Structured Data Testing Tool Crawl Your Site in Desktop Mode Instead of Mobile?

John Mueller explained on Twitter that Google's structured data markup testing tool crawls the submitted URL as a "neutral" crawler, which is interpreted most of the time by the site as a "desktop" cr...

Nov 05, 2018 ⚡ Analysis available

★★ Do 301 Redirects Between Unrelated Pages Really Lose All Their PageRank?

John Mueller provided more information during a hangout on how a 301 redirect passes "link juice" (PageRank) from one page to another. He initially indicated, as was already known, that 301 and 302 re...

Nov 05, 2018 ⚡ Analysis available

★★ Can You Host Your Website on Multiple Servers in Different Countries Without Hurting SEO?

John Mueller indicated on Twitter that having certain parts of a site hosted on a server with an IP address in one country (for example the United States) and other parts on another server with an IP ...

Oct 29, 2018 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Should You Implement Regional Hreflang Tags Instead of Country-Level Ones?

Some SEO professionals (including Aleyda Solis) have advocated for implementing hreflang tags down to the regional level, within a country, instead of staying at the country level as is currently the ...

Oct 29, 2018 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Does Producing Massive Amounts of Content Really Help You Rank Better on Google?

John Mueller explained, also on Twitter, that putting more and more content online did not make your site better in Google's eyes and would not help it rank better....

Oct 23, 2018 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Should You Still Bother With isRelatedTo and isSimilarTo in Product Schema?

John Mueller indicated on Twitter that Google does not take into account the "isRelatedTo" and "isSimilarTo" fields of the Schema.org Product tag. These two attributes allow you to indicate related or...

Oct 23, 2018 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Does Google Use Physical Store Traffic to Rank Websites?

John Mueller responded on Twitter to a question about whether Google might use IRL (In Real Life) data as relevance criteria. For example, whether there would be more people at a given time in a store...

Oct 15, 2018 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Are Quantitative Metrics Really Useless for Evaluating Content Quality in SEO?

John Mueller responded to a tweet to indicate that none of these criteria were used by Google to define content quality: word count, number of backlinks, text-to-anchor link ratio, number of outbound ...

Oct 15, 2018 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Should You Avoid Quotation Marks and Citations to Optimize Your SEO?

John Mueller indicated on Twitter that quoting someone or putting quotation marks around a word or phrase did not change the treatment that Google used in its analysis....

Oct 15, 2018 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Is Mobile First Indexing Really Behind Google's Recent Search Result Fluctuations?

John Mueller explained on Twitter that the latest major changes and Google algorithm updates we've seen over the past several months, even weeks, were not related to Mobile First Indexing....

Oct 15, 2018 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Should You Delete Low-Traffic Pages to Improve Your SEO?

John Mueller responded to a question about "content cannibalization" (low-traffic pages on a site receiving no SEO traffic). One approach proposed by an internet user was to delete this content, consi...

Oct 08, 2018 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ How Does Google Detect Links Created Solely for SEO Purposes?

John Mueller reminded forum users that Google considers a link to be low quality and in violation of its webmaster guidelines from the moment it was created solely for SEO purposes, even if the link m...

Oct 08, 2018 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Is There Really a Limit to How Many Meta Tags You Can Use on a Webpage?

John Mueller indicated on Twitter that to his knowledge, there was no limit to the number of meta tags (of any kind) that Google can crawl on a webpage....

Oct 01, 2018 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ How Does Google Actually Decide Between Manual Penalties and Algorithmic Spam Filters?

John Mueller explained during a hangout that Google has always tended to favor algorithmic filters to fight spam, rather than manual actions. A manual action will only be imposed (as part of a group p...

Oct 01, 2018 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Should You Really Avoid Multilingualism in Title Tags at All Costs?

John Mueller indicated on Reddit that it was largely preferable, in the vast majority of cases, to use only one language in a Title tag for a given page....

Oct 01, 2018 ⚡ Analysis available

★★ Should You Prioritize Technical Simplicity Over Complexity to Avoid Algorithmic Penalties?

John Mueller indicated on Reddit that it's better to implement a website for which you're certain about how search engines will process the pages. Rather than designing a site that's very uncertain at...

Sep 24, 2018 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Why Will the Mobile First Index Transition Take Several More Years to Complete?

John Mueller explained during a hangout that even though many webmasters have received messages in recent days indicating that their site has been validated in the Mobile First Index (MFI), the migrat...

Sep 24, 2018 ⚡ Analysis available